Disposable containers, such as beverage cups and sandwich containers, are widely used in the food and beverage industry due to their convenience and low cost. This type of container is often used in restaurants as well as at large public functions, such as outdoor music festivals and the like. Disposable containers create a significant volume of waste due to the shape of the containers even though the amount of material in the volume of waste is relatively small. There is therefore a need to reduce the volume of waste collected at such functions to be brought to landfills and other waste disposal sites.
One way of reducing the volume of waste generated by this type of function would be to manually stack and arrange collected waste. This is quite obviously a very tedious and time-consuming task. Garbage crushers may also be used to reduce the volume of waste but the necessary facilities are expensive and not widely available.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,115,914 (Dario) discloses a container for used plastic glasses. The container comprises a plurality of guides to stack the used glasses in a nesting arrangement. The container is lined with a garbage bag. When the guides are full of used glasses, the guides can be removed leaving a plurality of stacks of glasses in the garbage bag. While this container does reduce the volume of waste generated, it is quite cumbersome to empty the glasses from the container as they will have formed a large rigid stack within the container.
Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 5,263,602 (Lathouris) discloses a container system for recycling beverage cans and the like comprising a plurality of lined containers. The lined containers are dimensioned to contain a plurality of adjacent columns of stacked cans. The inner liner can be removed when full. Emptying this container system is also quite cumbersome as each liner will support a plurality of adjacent columns of stacked cans. The liners themselves are not of a standard shape and may be expensive to manufacture.
In addition to efforts to reduce volume of waste, there have also been developments in the use of environmentally friendly materials. For example, it is now possible to create disposable articles (e.g. containers for food and beverages) that are biodegradable and/or compostable. However, as not all waste collected at a particular site will be biodegradable and/or compostable, the biodegradable and/or compostable waste must be separated from the rest of the collected waste. This is also a tedious and time-consuming (therefore expensive) task.